I’d post who, but I literally read the issue, went “Huh”, finished it, and by the time I’d read my next comic, I’d totally forgotten said character had gotten bumped off.

I just don’t take deaths, especially major character deaths, remotely seriously in comics anymore. Not even those in the industry really take it seriously. When Marvel killed off Banshee, Peter David wrote his daughter not breaking down in mourning but shrugging and going for waffles. In Nextwave, death is so cheap that Monica Rambeau idly state “X-Men come back more than Jesus.” Hell, DC couldn’t make the death of Green Lantern they hyped up last more than an issue.

It’s not that this death isn’t major: This character will be missed, until Marvel needs to boost sales numbers and he comes back. And it establishes somebody else has gone nuts. But at this point, nobody takes these fatalities seriously. And why should they?

The problem is less how these deaths are written and more the fact that, well, they never ever stick. If you look over the characters that have actually stayed dead in the 616, almost inevitably it’s because the Punisher got them and also because they’re minor characters. Nobody wants them back, so they’re staying dead.

It would be nice to see a company pass a rule that a character stays dead for the length of an editor’s tenure, at least. That way, editors would be a bit more thoughtful about who they pick off for the sake of drama. And I might actually start remembering these deaths again.

This brings to mind how Colossus was supposed to be the poster boy for superheroes who stayed dead. And then Joss Whedon was like “Ehhhhhh, but I want him in my book.”

At least people in the Ultimate universe stay dead. Sometimes it “turns out” they never actually died or they’re a clone but people don’t seem to ever come back from real death. Gives it way more meaning and impact.

Are you forgetting Hammerhead? Dude had his head blown off by Gambit. Literally, Gambit charged his cranium with his power and it blew up.
And when he came back, they didn’t even try for an explanation (how do you explain that kind of thing away anyway?) So they just gave it the barest possible hand wave: “Didn’t you die?” “Yeah, didn’t stick.”

Yeah, death in comic books is becoming so invalidated that there is little to no drama. Why should I care how dangerous Batman’s life is if he will just come back every time he’s killed? What difference does it make when X-men die if they come back a special event later. There is no tension in comics any longer.

Believe it or not there was a time when it wasn’t necessary to kill off characters. People wrote stories, bad guys got the upper hand, good guys triumphed, and people went to jail or ran away with their tail between their legs. Of course that’s not iron agey enough. Death became a statement, and sometimes an appropriate one. Then sales became a statement when they came back. A double-bump: Once for death once for rebirth. And they could often squeeze in a second person taking up the mantle to maintain buzz.

So what was once a dramatic statement is now part of a script that every writer seems to go through.

Killing Captain Marvel was a curiosity. Killing Jean Grey was a big deal. Killing Jason Todd was huge. Killing Superman was both the biggest thing in comics in years and also the biggest joke. From there no death in mainstream comics seems to have ever counted. Who has stayed dead? Jean DeWolfe and the Flying Graysons?

I liked how Bullseye and Ares died. They had no real overall impact except to show the reader how fucking crazy their killers, Daredevil and Sentry, had become. But they both left you like “Holy shit. That happened.” Most Marvel deaths don’t even give you that.

I like the “for the tenure of the editor” idea. Puts a little more responsibility in the act of character death and makes sense that when a new guy shows up, he can change the playing field. As much as we would like death to stick in comics, they are after all just stories that have no clear beginning, middle or end. Fear Itself #7.2 did a good job of explaining cyclical storytelling and so I understand why people return from the dead.

It just didn’t help that it was spoiled in a popular newspaper and was the death of a character the Marvel Universe has shouted SHUT UP OLD MAN to for years now. Kids, no respect.